“Hey, wake up,” Hjarka says, shoving you in the shoulder, and you snap back to glare at her.
Ykka groans. “Remind me, Hjar, to someday tell you what usually happens when someone interrupts high-level orogeny. I mean, you can probably guess, but remind me to describe it in gory detail, so that maybe it can have some actual deterrent value.”
“She was just sitting there.” Hjarka sits back, looking disgruntled. “And the rest of you were just looking at her.”
“I was trying to hear the north,” you snap. They all look at you like you’re crazy. Evil Earth, if only someone else here were Fulcrum-trained. Though this isn’t something anyone but a senior would understand, anyway.
Lerna ventures, “Hear… the earth? Do you mean sess?”
It’s so hard to explain with words. You rub your eyes. “No, I mean hear. Vibrations. All sound is vibrations, I mean, but…” Their expressions grow more confused. You’re going to have to contextualize. “The node network is still there,” you say. “Alabaster was right. I can sess it if I try, a zone of stillness where the rest of the Equatorials are a seething disaster. Someone is keeping them, the node maintainers around Rennanis, alive, so—”
“So this is really them,” Cutter says, sounding troubled. “An Equatorial city really has decided to induct us.”
“Equatorials don’t induct,” Ykka says. Her jaw is tight as she speaks, gazing at the scrap of leather in her hand. “They’re Old Sanze, or what’s left of it. When Sanze wanted something back in the day, Sanze took it.”
After a tense silence, they start quietly panicking again. Too many words. You sigh and rub your temples and wish you were alone so you could try again. Or…
You blink. Or. You sess the hovering potentiality of the topaz, which drifts in the sky above Castrima-over, where it has been for the past six months, half-hidden amid the ash clouds. Evil Earth. Alabaster isn’t just sessing half the continent; he’s using the spinel to do it. You haven’t even thought about using an obelisk to extend your reach, but he does it like breathing.
“No one touch me,” you say softly. “No one speak to me.” Without waiting to see if they understand, you plunge into the obelisk.
(Because, well, some part of you wants to do this. Has dreamt of upward-falling water and torrential power for months. You are only human, whatever they say about your kind. It’s good to feel powerful.)
Then you’re in the topaz and through it and stretching yourself across the world in a breath. No need to be in the ground when the topaz is in air, is the air; it exists in states of being that transcend solidity, and thus you are capable of transcending, too; you become air. You drift amid the ash clouds and see the Stillness track beneath you in humps of topography and patches of dying forest and threads of roads, all of it grayed over after the long months of the Season. The continent seems tiny and you think, I can make the equator in the blink of an eye, but this thought scares you a little. You don’t know why. You try not to think—how far of a leap is it from thrilling in such power to using it to destroy the world? (Did Alabaster feel this, when he…?) But you are committed; you have connected; the resonance is complete. You launch yourself northward anyhow.
And then you stutter to a halt. Because there is something much closer than the equator that draws your attention. It is so shocking that you fall out of alignment with the topaz at once, and you are very lucky. There is a struck-glass instant in which you feel the shivering immensity of the obelisk’s power and know that you survive only because of fortunate resonances and careful long-dead designers who obviously planned for mistakes like yours, and then you are gasping and back within yourself and babbling before you quite remember what words mean.
“Camp, fire,” you say, panting a little. Lerna comes over and crouches in front of you, taking your hands and checking your pulse; you ignore him. This is important. “Basin.”
Ykka gets it instantly, sitting up straight and tightening her jaw. Hjarka, too; she’s not stupid, or Tonkee would never put up with her. She curses. Lerna frowns, and Cutter looks at all of you in rising confusion. “Did that actually mean something?”
Asshole. “An army,” you snap as you recover. But words are hard. “Th-there’s a… a rusting army. In the forest basin. I could. Sess their campfires.”
“How many?” Ykka is already getting up, fetching a longknife from a shelf and belting it round her thigh. Hjarka gets up, too, going to the door of Ykka’s apartment and pulling open the curtain. You hear her shouting for Esni, the head of the Strongbacks. The Strongbacks sometimes do scouting and supplement the Hunters, but in a situation like this, they are charged primarily with the comm’s defense.
You couldn’t count all the little blots of heat that pinged on your awareness when you were in the obelisk, but you try to guess. “Maybe a hundred?” That was the campfires, though. How many people around each fire? You guess six or seven apiece. Not a large force, under ordinary circumstances. Any decent quartent governor could field an army ten times that size on relatively short notice. During a Season, though, and for a comm as small as Castrima—whose total population is not much larger—an army of five or six hundred is a dire threat indeed.
“Tettehee,” Cutter breathes, sitting back. He’s gone paler than usual. You follow him, though. Six months ago, the stand of impaled corpses set up as a warn-off in the forest basin. The comm of Tettehee is beyond the basin, near the mouth of the river that wends through Castrima’s territory and ultimately empties into one of the great lakes of the Somidlats. You’ve heard nothing from Tettehee in months, and the trading party you sent past the warn-off failed to return. This army must have hit Tettehee around that time, then bunkered down there for a while, sending out scouting parties to mark territory. Replenishing stores, rebuilding arms, healing their wounded, maybe sending some of their spoils back north to Rennanis. Now that they’ve digested Tettehee, they’re on the march again.
And somehow, they know Castrima’s here. They’re saying hello.
Ykka heads outside and shouts alongside Hjarka, and within a few minutes someone is ringing the shake alarm and shouting for a gathering of the household heads at the Flat Top. You’ve never heard Castrima’s shake alarm—comm full of roggas—and it’s more annoying than you expected, low and rhythmic and buzzy. You understand why: Amid a bunch of crystalline structures, ringing bells aren’t the best idea. Still. You and Lerna and the rest follow Ykka as she strides along a rope bridge and around two larger shafts, her lips pressed together and face grim. By the time she reaches the Flat Top there’s a small crowd already there; by the time she yells for someone to stop blowing the rusting alarm and the alarm actually stops, the sheared-off crystal is starting to look dangerously packed with murmuring, anxious people. There’s a railing, but still. Hjarka shouts at Esni, and Esni in turn shouts at the Strongbacks amid the gathering, and they move clumsily to turn people away so there won’t be any horrible tragedies distracting from the possible horrible tragedy that looms imminent.
When Ykka raises her hands for attention, everyone falls silent instantly. “The situation,” she begins, and lays everything out in a few terse sentences.